


Impossibilities

by Shadaras



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Trans Sherlock, ftm character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 10:42:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/pseuds/Shadaras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is a girl's name, yet Sherlock was never a girl.<br/>(A reaction to the parting exchange between Sherlock and John.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Impossibilities

_Sherlock is actually a girl’s name._

Parting words, almost, to a friend so close he was amazed John hadn’t seen it. Surgery could do much, especially started young – and he had started hormones and surgery as a child taken seriously at a time when he, in moments of socio-political understanding he hated having, understood he shouldn’t have expected.

Yet, he had.

Mycroft hadn’t been able to force their mother to use his full name in all the years since leaving home, yet she knew Sherlock as her son. With that guideline, he supposed he had to admit it was _unlikely_ that John would have understood, would have _believed_ him.

(Especially after breaking his heart twice, the little part of his brain that _cared_ whispered. Sherlock shifted in his seat, determinedly staring at clouds instead of back past the wing to where John, faithful John, still stood.)

_Sherlock is actually a girl’s name._

He hadn’t left behind his name. Parts of it, to be sure, he had recreated – he had been not William Sherlock Scott Holmes but Willa Sherlock Scarlett Holmes. He kept the sound. (Sentiment; dangerous.) Changed his name, legally, as soon as he could – sooner than he should have been able to, by all rights, but having family fast-tracking to the government had advantages.

Even before then, he’d obsessively forced everyone he met to call him Sherlock. An unusual name, one that perhaps he was teased for but it was about the strangeness, not the masculinity he so-carefully cultivated, until those he met were at first unsure of his gender and then, by the time he took on his first case, by the time he was a teenager, everyone assumed him – rightly – male.

No wonder John had laughed.

_Sherlock is actually a girl’s name._

He’d laughed, turned away, disbelieving. A joke, yes. He’d said it then, knowing it could be taken as a joke, knowing that John might just brush it aside, assign it to perceived arrogance, narcissism, and the on-going conversation about what Mary and John would call their child. He’d known all that.

He’d said it anyway.

Sherlock leaned his forehead against the plastic window, heart thudding in his throat, caustic and broken in a way he had never expected to feel. Jumping from St. Barts had hurt. Being alone for two years had hurt. John attacking him for coming home had hurt.

But at least, then, he had been himself and acknowledged, accepted, and forgiven for it.

_Sherlock is actually a girl’s name_ , however?

John’s reaction to that, more than the plane itself, more than the accepted, painful choice of shooting Magnusson – John’s reaction, laughter and disbelief, was his death sentence, and he closed his eyes, forcing himself to become once more that tower of emotionless masculinity, that deductive force that showed emotions only as a play, that man who John knew and seemed, sometimes, to love.

Sherlock had told him, a parting gift, the secret of his birth that by now only his blood family knew.

And John, wonderful John, had, unknowingly, thrown the gift away.

The east wind blew and Sherlock opened his hands and his eyes, staring half-seeing into the clouds. Perhaps, with time, he would forgive John for that. Perhaps, in time, he would be forgiven himself and be able to return.

The former was more likely, in the way that his mother calling Mycroft by his full name was more likely than Sherlock ever being a girl.

Then a phone was passed to him and his brother spoke fateful words, and as the place cut a sharp arc through the sky, Sherlock leaned back in his seat and smiled to himself.

If one impossible thing happens, then, perhaps, a second impossibility is only improbable—

What if John could, in fact, accept that Sherlock was, once, named a girl?


End file.
